Homos.
1995. Cambridge: Harbard UP, 1996.
☆最近queer theoryは何を読んでも面白くて、しみじみリストつくってよかったなぁと思っているのだけど、これは面白いを通り越して爆笑の一冊であった。さしずめacademic なSouth Parkとてもいったところだろうか、笑いたくないのに笑ってしまう感じがなんともよかった。Psychoanalysisとqueer theoryの悩ましい関係を考えるにあたり、Foucaultと（そのFoucaultがほとんど一言の下にheteronormativity構築システムの僕とした）Freudの想像上の対話を常に頭に置いている（なおこれはIs the Rectum a Grave? に所収されている "Fr-oucault and the End of Sex" に詳細が書かれている）Bersaniはその批評的立場の微妙さとしては見習うべきところが大変多い（し、Freudian BodyにはCather論で大変お世話になった）。しかしなによりこの本で特筆すべきは、こんなに本を読んで笑ったことがあっただろうかというBersaniの赤裸裸な文体と、王様は裸だを旨とした絨毯爆撃といってもいいくらいの攻撃性（Homosの後には死屍隆々である）、それから誰とも手を繋がないという批評的覚悟（後述するようにこれはBersaniのgayとしてのqueer ethicsにも関わっている）だと思う。ButlerのUndoing Genderでも模索されていた、heteronormativeの外部としてのqueerな関係性を突き詰めるとどうなるか、という可能性のひとつが、この全てに唾を吐きかける孤独であり、それを（唾を吐きかけられながら）楽しむ読者との交流可能性のようなものなのかもしれない。この「ひとり」感はThoreauを考えるにあたりおそらく有益である。さらに昨今のqueer批評がgayを非性化、"de-gay"している（これはBersaniが他のエッセイでも粘着質といっていいほどに何度も引用しているFoucaultのインタビューでの発言、「ヘテロな社会が恐れているのはゲイのセックスそのものではなくて、それが示唆する新しい関係性の可能性である」や、Michael Warnerの "a determined resistance to regimes of the normal" というqueer定義に代表されるものだが）という指摘に関してはうなずけるところも多くはあるのだが、同時に素朴に全部が全部セックスってわけでもないよとも思う。実際BersaniはFoucault的な（そして同時にFreud的な）、sexualityはいわゆるsexに還元できるものではないという立場にたっているのだから、なんでもかんでも肛門性交の現実から目を背けているというのはなんというか変なんじゃないでしょうか。しかしやっぱり大好きな一冊であることには変わりはない。90年代半ばにあって、やはりこれほどまでにidenitity politicsに懐疑的なBersaniは先進的であったというほかにない。あと"hooking up my fantasy network" (103)というフレーズはすばらしい。
★Against "gay" identity: why should sexual preference be the key to identity in the first place? And, more fundamentally, why should preference itself be understood only as a function of the homo-heterosexual dyad? That dyad imprisons the eroticized body within a rigidly gendered sexuality, in which pleasure is at once recognized and letigimized as a function of genital differences between the sexes. . . . The portentous consequences of buying into the "homosexual" designation should now be clear: that term is a central piece in the profoundly biased cultural education we receive in sameness and difference--that is, in our self-forming perceptions of where we end and others begin, and where an dhow the frictions of otherness block the expansion of out selves. . . . The discrediting of a specific gay identity (and the correlative distrust of etiological investigation into homosexuality) has had the curious but predictable result of eliminating the indispensable grounds for resistance to, precisely, hegemonic regimes of the normal. (4)/ [T]he social project inherent in the nineteenth-century invention of "the homosexual" can perhaps now be realized: visibility is a precondition of surveillance, disciplinary intervention, and, at the limit, gender-cleansing. The classification into character types of how people imagine and pursue their bodies' pleasures greatly reduced the heterogeneity of erotic behavior. A psychology of desire, as Foucault forcefully argues, drew those readable psychic maps on which human beings had to be assigned their places before territory could be occupied. (11-12) Once we agreed to be seen, we also agreed to being policed. 両者ともFoucaultから出発しているから当たり前といえば当たり前なのだが、このvisibilityに対するambivalenceというのはButlerにも共有されている（特にUndoing Gender）。
★Invention of homosexuality as that which cements heterosexual identity: Foucault's notion that homosexuality has only been around since 1870s, however questionable it may be historically, has given a crucial, probably irreversible turn to our thinking: in asserting the historical contingency of homosexuality, he invites us to question the entire system of gendered binary oppositions of which homosexuality is only one term. . . . The dating of homosexuality was a momentous event because it initiated the study of how culture regulates identity. (35) Not only did homosexuals finds their existence and identity within the catgories from which they had been fashioned by straight society; they were also a distinctively heterosexual fantasy, the internally excluded difference that cements heterosexual identity. (36)
★★Against "de-gaying" gayness (a critique on "queer" theory): 上記のようにgay identityに対する懐疑は間違いなく重要だが、These efforts, while valuable, can have assimilative rather than subversive consequences; having de-gayed themselves, gays melt into the culture they like to think of themselves as undermining. . . . De-gaying gayness can only fortify homophobic oppression; it accomplishes in its own way the principal aim of homophobia: the elimination of gays. . . . [G]ay critique of homosexual identity have generally been desexualizing discourse. (5)/ But what's troubling is that, in rejecting the essentializing identities derived from sexual preference, they mount a resistance to homophobia in which the agent of resistance has been erased: there is no longer any homosexual subject to oppose the homophobic subject. (56)/ Our de-gaying resources seem limitless. Most recently, we have decided to be queer rather than gay. The history of gay is too bound up with efforts to define a homosexual identity. But queer has a double advantage: it repeats, with pride, a pejorative straight word for homosexual even as it unloads the term's homosexual referent. For oppressed groups to accept the queer label is to identify themselves as being actively at odds with a male-dominated, white, capitalistic, heterosexist culture. Gay becomes one aspect in Michael Warner's "resistance to regimes of the normal." This generous definition puts all resisters in the same queer bag--a universalizing move I appreciate but that fails to specify the sexual distinctiveness of the resistance. ←これはAbeloveなど、queernessのcentralization（anti-minoritization）とはまったく逆の動きとも言える。
★★Homosexuality and sameness: ［Homosexualityをsamenessと同義にみなすことに異議を唱えたMichael Warnerの "Homo-narcissism and Heterosexuality"（本文では直接言及されていないが）とは全く逆に、samenessに対する欲望にこそ、differenceをfetishizeするheteroな社会（それはさらにいえばdifferenceがhierarchyの別名であるだけで、実際にはpower relationshipに対する欲望でしかないとBersaniはするのだが）を脱臼させる可能性があるとする―これがタイトルでもあるHomosの意義の第一で、これはnarcissismやmelancholyを考える際にはとても重要になるだろう］Perhaps inherent in gay desire is a revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality. This of course means sociality as we know it, and the most politically disruptive aspect of the homo-ness I will be exploring in gay desire is a redefinition of sociality so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself. (7)/anticummunitarian impulse they discover in homosexual desire. . . demonstrating how desire for the same can free us from an oppressive psychology of desire as lack (a psychology that grounds sociality in trauma and castration) (7)/ We should be questioning the value of community and, even more fundamentally, the notion of relationality itself. (52) we might wish to cultivate the anticommunitarian impulses inherent in homo-ness. (53) ←これはButlerが賛美するdrag family が既成のtraditional family valueの書き換えにすぎないというところから。
★★The "straight mind" (Monique Wittig's concept): The straight mind valorizes difference. (39)/ Wittig--"The concept of difference has nothing ontological about it. It is only the way that the masters interpret a historical situation of domination, The function of difference is to mask at every level the conflicts of interest, including ideological ones." (39)/ The straight mind might be thought of as a sublimation of this privileging of difference. . . . If it is difficult, within this system, to think of differences nonantagonistically, it is because, as I suggested, antagonism is bound up in the very origins of differential perception. (40)
★★Pleasing instability of "we": I discover, in rereading myself, that I have become an ambiguous "we"--a fact I both welcome and find somewhat troubling. We are these others I repeatedly add to myself? (8) My "we" in this book is constantly crossing over into the territory of other "we's." . . . These intersections of divergent lines of identity and experience give a pleasing instability to the "we" of this book. . . This mobility should create a kind of community, one that can never be settled, whose membership is always shifting. It is also a community in which many straights should be able to find a place. (9)この想像の共同体としての揺れる"we" というのはtranscendentalismを考えるにあたりある種有効なコンセプトかもしれない。An anticommunal mode of connectedness (10)
★AIDS and how it constructed homosexuality: The heightened visibility conferred on gay men by AIDS is the visibility of imminent death, of a promised invisibility. Straight America can rest its gaze on us, let us do our thing over and over in the media, because what out attentive fellow citizens see is the pathos and impotence of a doomed species. (21) AIDS, like syphilis in the nineteenth century, merely legitimates a fantasy of both gay and female sexuality as diseased, indeed fatal. (27) AIDSはhomosexualと貧困層しかかからない病気であるとしてゲットー病化され、隔離されることによってgayはさらに他者化される。このゲイの他者化戦略はしかし、もちろんhomosexualityが内面的なもので、それに「感染」することで自身もhomosexualになりうるという恐怖から行われている。the threat of homosexuality does not lie in the characteristics attributed to it: it is exactly identical with just being homosexual. No other group could carry the menace of homosexuality without turning out to be a homosexual group. . . . The illusion that they are other, that they exist only out there, must at all costs be maintained. (29)
★(White) lie of "subversiveness" of parody of gender norms: But how subversive is parody? . . . Heavy stuff for some silly and familiar campiness. (48) The appropriation of hegemonic norms partly subverts them and partly reidealizes them. (51) These mimetic activities [such as drag] are too closely imbricated in the norms they continue. As long as the cues for subversion are provided by the objects to be subverted, reappropriation may be delayed but is inevitable: reappropriation, and reidealization. (51)/ to repeat one of the least appreciated lines in "Is the Rectum a Grave", we admit to having told a few lies about ourselves (and others). ←これは元の文脈ではgay communityをhierarchyのないegalitarianな共同体とするかのようなdesexualized representationについて
★Difficulty in conceiving gay as oppressed group: Gay pride often seems identical to gay shame. When we are scolded for speaking like advantaged white males, we beg to instructed by those demonstrably more oppressed than we are. (63)/ For an impoverished African-American, to conform is to embrace the racial and economic injustices from which he or she suffers; for a woman, to conform is to accept a heterosexist definition of female identity; for most gay men, to conform is to pick up the perquisites waiting for them as men. As the debate about gays in the military has confirmed, society is willing to give a gay man equal opportunity if he makes his gayness invisible. This is hardly the contract it has with racial minorities, with the poor, or with women. (67) Things have changed. No more hiding, no more guilty transgressive sex . . . . So, once again, we melt in--either into those other groups whose oppressed state we yearn to share or into mainstream America. (67-68)
★S/M as "A different economy of bodies and pleasures"--Foucault (79): The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure, and the idea that sexual pleasure is the root of all our possible pleasure--I think that's something quite wrong (Foucault qtd. 80). しかしBersaniはFoucaultのSMの賞賛を退ける。結局はdominance and submissionという差異の関係性そのものだから。いくらそれをパロディしているとはいえ、そしてそれを社会的文脈からずらしているとはいえ（dragといっしょで）、結局は根底にあるものを idealizeし再強化しているにすぎないから。It is a kind of X-ray of power's body, a laboratory testing of the erotic potential in the most oppressive social structures. (89) S/M's celebration of master and slave renders it (on the whole involuntarily) complicit with the perpetuation of regimes that promote the erotic opportunities of domination and enslavement . . . (90) ただしreversibility of the rolesについては：From that reversibility we may also conclude that perhaps inherent in the very exercise of power is the temptation of its renunciation--as if the excitement of a hyperbolic self-assertion, of an unthwarted mastery over the world and, more precisely, brutalization of the other, were inseparable from an impulse of self-dissolution. (96) nonsuicidal disappearance of the subject (99) I call jouissance "self-shattering"ub that it disrupts the ego's coherence and dissolves its boundaries. (101)←transcendentalismとmasochismというのは考えてみてもよいセンだと思う。transcendentalismによる仏教受容やUncle Tom's CabinのSM性と絡めて。Nonrelational sexualityを考える？
